If the rise of digital photography has made film a niche product, then Lomography LomoChrome Purple XR 100-400 ($11.90 per roll) occupies a niche within a niche. The unique color negative film is a modern take on Kodak's long discontinued Aerochrome III infrared film, which rendered green grass and foliage in rich red and purple tones. LomoChrome isn't sensitive to infrared, but instead produces its unique look through a chemical formulation that causes severe color shift in images and a dark green film base that really pushes the purple. It's a unique look that isn't appropriate for every situation, but if you're intrigued by it, it's worth trying out. The biggest issue is the price—at $11.90 a roll, it's more than twice the cost of premium color negative stocks like Kodak Ektar 100 ($5.50 per roll). And Lomography only offers it in 5, 10, or 15 roll packs, but other retailers have started to offer it as single rolls.

The film can be had in 35mm or 120 (medium format) rolls. You'll get 36 exposures on a standard 35mm camera, but with 120 the number of shots varies based on the aspect ratio of your camera system. A square format camera like a Rolleiflex TLR or Hasselblad nets 12 images, but you can stretch that to 16 exposures if you use a 645 system. The film has a native ISO 400 rating, but it can also be rated at ISO 100 or 200. You'll get deeper purple by shooting at ISO 400, and lighter shades if you opt for ISO 100. But there's plenty of exposure latitude, so you shouldn't have to worry too much about blowing out highlights.

Regardless of how your rate the film, the colors you see with your eyes are not what it captures. Greens turn purple, pinks become yellow, and blues turn to green. Reds stay constant, which creates a lovely contrast, and it helps to preserve skin tones. That's a plus if you're photographing people, as they'll continue to look human in images, even if the landscape around them appears alien.

For my first test of LomoChrome, I loaded a roll of the 35mm format film into my trusty Leica M3 and attached one of my favorite vintage lenses, the 50mm Dual Range Summicron, with the intent of taking some photos at the very green Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Tarrytown, N.Y. The Summicron tends to draw foliage in the out-of-focus areas of an image with a swirly bokeh look, and I thought that the changing the standard green swirl to be purple would be visually striking. I rated the film at ISO 100 and used a Voigtlander VC Speed Meter II to check the light, as the M3 has no internal light meter.

Despite it being August, I ended up catching a very gray, unseasonably cool day for this shooting expedition. I normally love shooting in these conditions, as the cloud cover keeps light soft and even. But I feel I missed out by not having bright blue skies to pull out backgrounds. For the most part, my subjects were monochromatic headstones and monuments—either brown, gray, or in some cases white in color. I tried to frame more ground than sky behind my subjects, but I think a green sky would have gone a long way to give photos more pop.

If you shoot film regularly, or even occasionally, you'll know where you can get it processed, and how much it will cost. LomoChrome is a color negative stock, so you won't have to seek out a specialty shop or pay the high prices that go along with processing positive slide film. It's about $8 per roll for same-day processing at my local lab in Manhattan, and I can save some money by opting for $3 next-day processing at a local photo shop in New Jersey. I scan negatives at home, which can be time consuming, but when working with a unique stock like this, control over the scanning process is important to get the best results.

I still found LomoChrome a bit tricky to scan. I use the VueScan scanning application along with a dedicated Minolta 35mm scanner, and after a bit of experimentation opted for a color profile based on a Fujifilm negative stock. And as I usually do, I adjusted the white point, black point, and brightness from shot to shot to get the flattest results, with the intention of editing the TIF scans in Lightroom after processing. I was a bit worried about the film during scanning, as everything—even the gray monuments that my lens was focused on—was very, very purple.

But once I got the images into Lightroom, I experimented a little with the color adjustment sliders. I upped the color temperature a bit, which turned the purple statues into a more neutral gray once again, and still showed the grass and trees around them with a strong purple hue. There were a few shots where I wasn't able to pull out the purple cast without giving the photos an almost monochromatic look, but it's tough to tell if that's an issue with subject matter, metering, or some combination thereof. I quickly concluded that, with a film like this, there really isn't a wrong way of doing things—I was able to get the interesting results out of most of the images on the roll, and that was enough to make me happy.

Lomography LomoChrome Purple XR 100-400 is never going to be my everyday film—but for occasional use its unique look can be a hell of a lot of fun. You're not going to easily recreate its look with digital manipulation, and even though it's not the easiest film to scan, that look is worth the effort. After my initial roll, I plan on trying it under bright blue skies, and with more varied subject matter. If you're at all intrigued by the purple tones, I heartily recommend giving LomoChrome a try. The only real hangup is its price, and the fact that if you buy it direct from Lomography, you're locked into getting five rolls minimum. But some speciality photo shops have started to carry it and offer it as a single roll, which makes experimenting with it a less costly prospect. Be warned: If you really fall in love with the film, you may be buying it in bulk before too long.

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Senior digital camera analyst for the PCMag consumer electronics reviews team, Jim Fisher is a graduate of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where he concentrated on documentary video production. Jim's interest in photography really took off when he borrowed his father's Hasselblad 500C and light meter in 2007. He honed his writing skills at retailer B&H Photo, where he wrote thousands upon thousands of product descriptions, blog posts, and reviews. Since then he's shot with hundreds of camera models, ranging from pocket point-and-shoots to medium format...
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